January 31 - Australia: Cairns
PADI Assistant Instructor Course - Day 3
More $##@&*&@*)&%$ Ants
Went out for another run this morning, and came back to deal with the line of ants that REFUSES to die. So I pulled out the ant poison we'd bought when we got here. The bummer about this stuff is that it actually attracts ants before it kills them. They come and pick it off and take it back to the colony, where it ends up wiping them out. This sounds good, but I hate the fact that the amount of ants actually quadruples before they go away. But my previous grumbling-squishing strategy obviously wasn't working. Time to pull out the big dogs.
Is this borderline obsessive behavior?
Assistant Instructor Class
This morning, we had lectures on teaching Open Water sessions. In PADI Diving Courses, there are basically three teaching sessions: (1) Knowledge Development Lectures (classroom time), (2) Confined Water Sessions (skills practice in the pool), and (3) Open Water Sessions (skills practice in the ocean). We're being taught how to deliver all three successfully. The Open Water, of course, is the most crucial and potentially dangerous, so we'll spend a few days talking about it.
Lunch was between 12:45-1:45, and then we had lectures on teaching Project Aware and Peak Performance Buoyancy courses.
Bikini Parade
The guys break up the monotony of the day with what they call "Bikini Duty". The window of our second floor classroom looks out over the DSDD Pool, and it provides an excellent view of the swimmers below. So whenever the guys hear the weight belts clank in the boxes downstairs, they know that people are either retrieving or returning their weight belts. And - they hope - some of the people are girls in bikinis. So they run to the window to see what they can see. Just like Pavlov's dogs: hear the bell, get some food.... hear the weight belts, get a view. Same difference. It's good to know that some basic psychological theories don't change with time.
Today, there was a class of Open Water students of 8 in which 6 of them were girls in bikinis. They were in heaven. Here's a picture of the guys on Bikini Duty:
Yes. That's my husband on the chair. Better view that way.
Confined Water Presentations
In the evening, we hit the pool for Confined Water skills. The purpose of the Confined Water Presentation is for us to present our skill to a group of "students" and to watch them practice these skills in the pool. Our "students" will be assigned problems which we have to catch and then debrief them about it. This is actually much more difficult than it sounds. In the end, we're scored on our Briefing skills, our Problem Solving skills, and our Debriefing skills. AnnaMarie and Vic have underwater slates to keep track of our scores, but we cheerfully refer to AnnaMarie's as the "Chookie Chart". This makes her laugh, which is good because she's even more exhausted than we are. She is extra tough on us to prepare us for the IE (Instructor Exam), which she says seem easy compared to her scoring.
I presented the snorkel-regulator exchange, which sounds very easy but it's easy to lose points if you misdiagnose or completely miss a problem. Since this was our first go, our scores were pretty low. Add this to the fact that we were completely exhausted, and that makes some pretty poor presentations. But most of us passed and we'll have another Confined Water Presentation again in two days. Practice makes perfect.
Dinner and Homework
At 9:00-ish, we went home and finished off the pasta sauce. Tomorrow we have another Knowledge Presentation, so I began work on mine. Jon is going to do his tomorrow morning. I worked through "Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit" and tried to stay focused. I spent twenty minutes trying to think of a "contact" to relate my students to the topic of "Peak Performance Buoyancy - Fine Tuning Buoyancy Underwater". I finally came up with a Star Wars analogy of Luke Skywalker racing his X-wing through the trenches of the Death Star and having to maintain his buoyancy. I thought it was a pretty cool analogy!